Is there a way I can configure single sign on or pass-through authentication so that kibana does not prompt all of my users for their credentials but pulls them in?
Auth with KB is coming with 4.4, which will land very soon.
Not sure about SSO though.
Active Directory SSO is typically done with kerberos via SPNEGO. Shield does not support this out of the box but a custom realm could be written to support this method of authentication.
There is a community plugin that has been implemented that may provide this support, but I have not used it before.